Sonoco Products Company, commonly referred to as Sonoco, is a global provider of consumer packaging, industrial products, protective packaging and packaging supply chain services. Founded in 1899 and headquartered in Hartsville, South Carolina, US, Sonoco has operations in more than 85 countries and serves customers in various industries, including food and beverage, personal care, healthcare, industrial and automotive. HCLTech has been Sonoco's strategic partner since 2011 and has been instrumental in their Oracle modernization initiatives.
The Challenge
The current version of the Oracle E-business suite has reached the end of its life and presented substantial challenges in terms of performance uncertainties as it has degraded over the last several years. It has also become expensive to scale the system in their on-premises data center. There was also a business imperative to ensure that the system is available 24x7 across 200+ manufacturing plants worldwide – NA, SA, EU and APAC. System downtime for patching/maintenance is highly challenging. It also posed challenges to archiving data on a regular basis.
The Objective
The partnership between Sonoco and HCLTech was established with objectives specifically focused on modernizing the Oracle E-Business suite. To tackle these challenges and improve performance and availability, they needed a pragmatic and forward-thinking approach to seamlessly modernize their Oracle E-Business Suite from on-premises data centers to the OCI without disrupting regular business operations.
The solution
As part of HCLTech OCI Move and Improve offering, the right set of methods (Discover-Migrate-Manage) and tools were leveraged to modernize the on-premises applications – Oracle E-Business suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). To successfully transition these applications to OCI, the transformation process required careful planning, future-proof cloud architecture, complex configurations and execution. It involved the following deliverables:
- Discover - Evaluated Sonoco’s current on-premises Oracle environment, including hardware, software, configurations and architecture. We also assessed workload requirements, performance needs, security considerations and compliance requirements. We then planned the migration strategy, identifying the workloads to migrate, the order of migration and any necessary modifications or upgrades.
- Migrate - Created an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancy for Sonoco, establishing essential resources such as virtual cloud networks, subnets, security lists, route tables and gateways. We provisioned OCI instances tailored to Sonoco's workload requirements, including compute, storage, networking and load balancing. The migration process involved transferring Sonoco's data RAC database from on-premises to ExaCS on OCI. To minimize business impacts during application migration, we utilized the DataGuard technology for the offline capability application (MySF). Additionally, we migrated and upgraded various applications, deploying servers, web servers, middleware, etc., within OCI.
- Manage - Monitored and optimized OCI environment for cost, performance and security continuously. We implemented best practices for managing OCI resources, including backup and disaster recovery strategies, compute consumption and storage allocations. Continuous evaluation of Oracle Cloud services and features was done to leverage new capabilities as they become available.
The Impact
The successful modernization of Sonoco's Oracle E-Business suite applications to OCI has improved supportability and security. Significantly fast performance was observed. It also provided for heightened data security, robust disaster recovery capabilities and ability to handle demanding workloads.
Significant benefits included
- Online patching: Substantial benefit to Sonoco’s global user base and 24x7 operation. Critical business operations and revenue-generating activities continue during patching.
- Business process improvements: Customization elimination, ECC Dashboards for efficient reports and analytics, cost-efficient AP Invoice automation, improved credit management and receivables.
